What's it like to reexamine our view of history after removing barriers of racism and bias? And what might a new class of women political leaders might learn from the women who have held power and authority for a thousand years?
Guest: Sally Roesch Wagner, Ph.D., author and scholar
Lori Walsh:
Sally Roesch Wagner, thank you so much for being here with us today. We appreciate your time, and having you on the program once again.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Oh, it's my treat, Lori. I love to be interviewed by you, and to work with you. You have the best questions.
Lori Walsh:
Oh, well thank you. And we love your South Dakota connections, as well as everything that you're doing in the world, and the insight. And now, through this program, the South Dakota Humanities Council, which is part of a Mellon Foundation, and humanities councils from states all across America, this Why It Matters initiative is where we're starting our conversation today.
When we talk about democracy, we're actually starting 1,000 years ago or so with the Haudenosaunee women, which is not where most people start that story. Tell us a little bit for people who are new to this story, why these women, why this community, this culture, was relevant to a conversation about civic participation and political authority and influence in 2020.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Well, I'm speaking to you from Haudenosaunee territory. And these are the five, later six, nations that joined together and created a peace confederacy 1,000 years ago on the shores of Onondaga Lake outside of Syracuse, where I live. And the women have the responsibility, and have had this for 1,000 years of nominating, holding in position, and removing if it becomes necessary, the chiefs that they install to represent their clan.
So, these are women who have had political voice for 1,000 years, while in the United States, we're celebrating women having a political voice guaranteed in the conversation for only 100 years. So, I look at that and I think, "Let's see, if somebody has 1,000 years of experience, and I have 100, what is the most logical thing that I should do?"
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Maybe listen?
Lori Walsh:
Maybe listen.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Maybe listen? How do you do this for 1,000 years? And arguably, the oldest continuing democracy in the world. So, it was a model for the U.S. They had the vision of this from Western history, The Founding Fathers, and mothers you might add. But the Fathers, of course, taking the power to make the decisions.
But they had this idea from ... There was partial democracy in Greece, and partial democracy in Rome. But they saw actual democracy in-practice with the Haudenosaunee. Now, is this true of all Native women? Well, ask the Lakota how traditional is it for the women to have authority? I think that Lakota women are beginning to claim their own history.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. And that is the ancestral land that I join you from-
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Yes.
Lori Walsh:
... and that we broadcast from. Let's talk about some of that early contact and influence. George Washington refers to these as the petticoat chiefs because they are in conversation with their women, there's influences in Jefferson, and Ben Franklin. But I really want to talk about some of these women, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, of course, who will be influenced by these women, who will be in conversation with Haudenosaunee women. And that is what they need to see to imagine life in a different way.
So, before we get there, contrast the rights of the time of this contact between Haudenosaunee women and these European women who are living under ... what is it? Blackstone's code of common ... How different are their lives? Tell us that, please.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Well, we might begin, actually, with Abigail Adams. When she warns John, "If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we're determined to foment a rebellion." And I think what she's referring to is that England had recently adopted a very repressive common code, common law code. And it was the Blackstone code, which said once women married, they were dead in the law. They ceased to exist legally.
And The Founding Fathers went ahead and, boom, they threw off British rule, and they adopted this repressive code. And each of the states adopted it, and it made it illegal for women to vote, it made it illegal for women to hold onto their own possessions once they married. Everything you owned became your husband's. You lost your right to your body. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said at one point, "A woman needs a quitclaim to her own body once she's married." Because husbands could rape their wives. They had the legal right to marital rape.
Rape was defined as an act of unlawful sexual intercourse with someone other than the wife of the perpetrator. And it wasn't until the 1980s and 1990s that the second wave of feminism began to change those laws, and the marital rape laws don't even exist until then. So-
Lori Walsh:
The 1980s, the 1990s. Not the 1880s.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Oh no.
Lori Walsh:
We're talking the 1980s and '90s. Yeah.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
I remember in the California Legislature, I think it was 1980, the first marital rape law was introduced into the California Legislature. And one of the senators stood up on the floor of the Senate in California and said, "Oh, come on, guys. If you can't rape your wife, who can you rape?" And everybody laughed, explosion of laughter. This was in 1980.
There are, in most states today, because of the work of feminists ... in most states and most territories today, it is illegal under most conditions for husbands to rape their wives. Not quite complete, but almost. Husbands have the right to beat their wives as long as they did not inflict permanent damage. And the religious logic behind this was because of the sin of Eve, woman is to be under the authority of her husband. And that goes all the way through to Saint Paul in the Bible.
And so, what does that mean to be under the authority? You have to obey your husband. In the marriage ceremony, women said they would obey. Men didn't. It was you were to obey your husband. That wasn't just a religious thing. That becomes translated from Canon Law into Common Law. So, you had to obey your husband. You did not have the right to leave a marriage if your life was in danger because the idea prevailing in most denominations at that point was that marriage was not a civil union. That was a hard-won battle to get marriage to find as an agreement between two people. Before then, it was marriage was a covenant with God and could not be broken.
So, you had to stay. If you left, your husband could declare you a runaway wife, and you were required to live where he told you to live. And so, if he contacted the authorities and said, "My wife has run away," they could bring you back.
Lori Walsh:
And they did.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
They did. You had no right to the children that you gave birth to. A husband could will away an unborn child, on his deathbed, knowing he's dying, he says, "This child, once it's born, will be given to so-and-so," and that child is ripped out of the mother's arms and given to it's rightful owner. And the woman had no legal recourse. That was the position of women before the women's movement. There were some changes state by state before, but not until the women's movement really began to demand changes.
Lori Walsh:
And one of the reasons ... Tell me about this. When you mentioned Eve and you mentioned Christian scripture with Paul, the men feel that they are saving the souls of ... This is their responsibility.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Exactly.
Lori Walsh:
Talk a little bit about that, the reason why this was taken so seriously by so many husbands and fathers was because they truly believed that were not for them, eternal damnation is what is at stake.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Exactly. And that's a logic that it takes a little bit ... Well, maybe not for other people. For me, I may just be dense, but it was hard for me to understand this logic. But you've got it exactly, Lori. Here's what it was. If a woman is to obey her husband, a wife is to obey her husband, what happens if she dies in a state of disobedience? She has the spiritual religious responsibility to obey him. That's God's edict from the literal reading of the Bible.
So, she dies and she has disobeyed him. Where is she going to go?
She's going some place where it's pretty hot. As hot as South Dakota can be on a summer day, and hotter. But whose fault is it? Now, this is where the logic gets tricky.
Lori Walsh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Whose fault is it? It's not hers. It's her husband's. Because he did not enforce obedience. And so, if you really love your wife, you're going to beat her into submission. You're going to use whatever means are necessary to ensure that she obeys you, to ensure her salvation.
Lori Walsh:
So, women who are living under that sort of culture, they're hearing this in church, they're hearing it from everyone legally, in conversation, that's what they're reading. In order for them to get to the point where they say, "There is something else that is possible," they need to see that it is possible. And they see it in the Haudenosaunee women, and how there's an entirely different way of life.
Lori Walsh:
Tell me a little bit about some of what we know about the early suffragists' connections with some of these clan mothers and leaders of the time.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
I think I'm going to back up just a minute here, Lori, and tell you that if one of my students had come to me 40 years ago ... I've been teaching for 50 years. I had my 50th-year anniversary this year. If somebody had come to me 40 years ago and said, "I think that there's some Native influence on women's rights," you know what my response would've been?
Lori Walsh:
Hmm?
Sally Roesch Wagner:
"Uh, I don't think so. If there was, somebody would've figured that out by now. Somebody would've." Well, it took me a lot of figuring out to get to the point of, "This is real." And what I realized was that, once I started talking about it and writing about it, was that Native women were saying, "That's great, we've always known that." [inaudible 00:13:06] a White scholared woman and make it real. Not, not, not. I'm only repeating what ...
Anyway, and some didn't. Because of the boarding school education, because of the training. But okay. What was the contact? Well, my question really that I began with was, "How did Matilda Joslyn Gage get such a transformational vision?" Our own Matilda, all her kids ended up in South Dakota. My mother's good friend was Matilda Gage from Aberdeen, that's how I stumbled into all of this, and fell in love with this dead woman in 1973, and really wanted to understand ... She is talking about a transformed world.
She is talking about the end of every existing institution, the result of the regenerated world. Whoa. Where did this come from? Her major work, Woman, Church, and State, she says ... and it's online and searchable, you can also buy it through the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, but she says, "Never was justice more perfect, never was civilization higher." And you know what she's talking about?
Lori Walsh:
Tell us.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
[inaudible 00:14:32]. The Haudenosaunee. So, that's the starting point. So, what did she see? And she writes about how women have authority for the land. This is in 1893. Same book in which she exposes sex trafficking in the United States, and exposes the Catholic priests are sexually violating children and women. 1893.
In this same book, Woman, Church, and State, she writes about how Haudenosaunee women, Iroquois is the name the French gave them, it may be more commonly recognized. They have responsibility for the land. They have the responsibility for determining whether there will be war. They control the economy through controlling the agriculture. They're the agriculturalists.
The most sacred is life. And who creates life? Women. And Mother Earth. Mother Earth sustains us, women create life. That's a turning upside-down, rather than the Father in the sky. This is the Mother in the Earth that is the spiritual center.
And so, because women are the creators of life, the idea is they're the ones most sacred to bring forth life from the soil. And she writes about corn, beans, and squash, the ecologically perfect and nutritionally perfect food group that the women raise together, and the abundance with which they raised it. And nobody went hungry.
So, she understood all of this, and she wrote about the responsibilities of the clan mothers. She saw a world in balance and harmony. She saw it first-hand. She was invited to ceremony at the Onondaga Nation. She writes about these sacred ceremonies, and she says, "During the Middle Ages, it was the warrior who was most respected rather than the products ..." Products is not the right word. The relatives, if you think we are all related, Mitakuye Oyasin same belief with the Haudenosaunee, but we are all in relationship with each other, all living things.
And what we know now scientifically is that's all true, we're all stardust. We're all made from the same thing. So, it's a knowledge that, I think because Matilda Joslyn Gage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott all had begun to really become critical of Christianity and its role in the oppression of women in Western Christian societies, that they were able to see beyond that sort of Christian exceptionalism that led to the boarding school experience. "Christianize and civilize the Indians. They're heathens. We need to bring them to the true light." They had gone past that.
And so, they were able to see a culture that was beyond anything that they could even imagine in their own. But here it is in reality. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who is called a heretic for calling for divorce if a woman's life is in danger, or the marriage is loveless, she talks about divorce Haudenosaunee-style. She says, "The wife puts his belongings outside the longhouse." That's it. Who lives in that longhouse? Well, the clan mother, the mother, the father, the sisters and their husbands, the husbands come to live with the sisters, the unmarried brothers, the ones that aren't married yet. Once they marry, they go live with their wives' clan. And why is that? Because children come through the mother, not the father.
And so, matrilineal culture, not a patriarchal patrilineal culture like ours. And so, all of this makes sense in an integrated way. Elizabeth Cady Stanton talks about how, if the chief misbehaves himself, if he doesn't behave the way he should, the clan mother, "... cuts off his horns." That's the phrase she uses. She removes him from his office. He holds the horns, a symbol of the authority that she places on him. She's the eyes and the ears. He's the voice of the clan. And she instructs him. The petticoat government, when the Haudenosaunee came to do treaties with the colonists or the U.S. government, their first question was, "Where are your women? We can't do a treaty. We're going to be talking about land and there's no women? Women are in charge of land. What? You guys don't know anything? What's going on here? We tend to universalize."
So, those are a couple with Gage. Gage ends up being given an honorary adoption into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation, and a real name. The same year she's arrested for voting in her own nation.
She supports treaty rights and sovereignty. In her women's rights newspaper, she writes about the superior position of Haudenosaunee women when she's President of the National Woman Suffrage Association, does a series of articles as President. So, this knowledge is back and forth. Those things that Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, those at the National Council of Women, a speech in 1891. And it wasn't just these women.
Lucretia Mott, I'll give this example. Lucretia Mott spends a month with ... and a good bit of that time is with the Seneca, one of the Haudenosaunee nations. And when she writes about her summer experience, she comes from Cattaraugus, the Seneca community, where she watches the women plan this spiritual ceremony, this strawberry ceremony she was there for. She watches the women be an equal participant in the governmental decisions, and she then comes to visit her friends in the Seneca Falls area. And together, they plan the first local women's rights convention in Seneca Falls in the summer of 1848.
Now, when she writes about this ... and in the anthology I did, The Women's Suffrage Movement for Penguin Classics, I looked and looked and looked to find her description of Seneca Falls. I found it in a letter she wrote to an antislavery paper, and she writes about her whole summer. She spends three paragraphs describing her experience with the Seneca, with the Haudenosaunee. One paragraph on the Seneca Falls Convention. I don't know if that's [inaudible 00:22:15].
But you think about, okay, you've been to paradise. You come back and you meet with some of your friends. Possibly you might talk about that.
Lori Walsh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Sally Roesch Wagner:
As they're planning the Seneca Falls Convention, what do you think she's talking about?
Lori Walsh:
Right.
Yeah. I want to ask you this about your own scholarship, though. As you said, you've been teaching 50 years and if someone had come and asked you this early in your academic career, you would've said, "Yeah, I don't think so." So much in 2020 has been made of racism in academia and in places where you aren't necessarily looking for it if you don't know to look.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
But for Black and Brown people, they're very aware that it was there. So, my question to you is what was the role of racism in inhibiting some of the scholarship that you didn't even know what you were looking for? You maybe had overlooked it already ten times. What can you say about that now from the perspective where you stand today?
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Yeah. I have to speak as a recovering racist. I read Women, Church, and State for the first time in 1973. I read that book, I wrote every introduction to every way it was printed. And I never saw those words, "Never was justice more perfect, never was civilization higher." I didn't see those words for 15 years.
And I didn't see those words. I realized once I kind of had a ... I call them my White-girl-time-outs. Until I really said, "Okay, you've got to look at why didn't you see that. It's in the first chapter of her major work. There's no two ways to interpret those. Those words are pretty definitive, and she is clearly talking about the Haudenosaunee. Why didn't you see it?"
And my thought was it was because underneath all the work that I'd done on racism, I had conducted numerous anti-racist workshops. I had really tried to examine my own racism. Racism lays so deep. I'll speak about myself in me, that I did not even recognize what I held was the idea that Native women wouldn't have anything to teach White women anyway, they were just beasts of burden. They'll walk ten paces behind their husbands.
That was the knowledge that was hidden deep underneath any other kind of knowledge. And it was a deeply embedded racism. What I didn't know is I perceived so slow, with any of my scholarship, because it's recognizing the poison of racism that is endemic in the culture in which I live, and that occupies a deep space in. White exceptionalism, the privilege that I live with every single second, most of which I'm not aware of as a White person. It's a constant ... Recovering racist is the best that I can describe myself. Because it is one day at a time, it is, "Whoa, there's a little bit more I just realized, and a little bit more I just realized."
But I think when I can get past the shame and guilt, those feelings, and get to a point of, "I'm a better person, I think, each time I can recognize my own racism and move to a better place."
Lori Walsh:
And I want to ask you this along the same vein, as a White woman, you say in the movie Without a Whisper that hanging out with Louise Hearn, who is a clan mother, just spending time with her and other women makes you feel like a new woman.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lori Walsh:
Just hanging out, I think you say.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
You are influenced by the way in which they inhabit their authority, inhabit their own bodies, just the people that they are. I've had those experiences too, in my life, and I stand back and I'm like, "What just happened? What's happening there, where I am standing next to this woman and all of a sudden I feel like I'm different as a human being?"
What can you tell me about that, as a woman living a White experience, to be with someone like Louise, to be in friendship and academic scholarship with her, but then also just step back and say, "That's an incredible thing that I have hard time articulating."
Sally Roesch Wagner:
I could talk about Louise, but I'm going to be honest with you, what first comes to mind is Tillie Black Bear, and my friendship with Tillie, the unexpected friendship with Tillie, and a whole bunch of luck with the women that had a generous-enough spirit to bring me into their lives. And that, to me, is the wonder. These are people who should see me as their enemy. And given the history, the legacy, they have no reason to befriend me. But they have a spiritual base, a spiritual foundation that is so much deeper than anything that I have culturally.
And it's a generosity that allows them to see beyond, and into a place of friendship. Tillie Black Bear transformed my life.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Stella Pretty Sounding Flute transformed my life. I could spend hours with you, Lori, naming the women who have transformed my life. And in ways that I didn't even recognize.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
It's like we universalize our own world. And these are women who ... Standing with a group of Lakota women, when a man comes along who needs to be brought out of his sense of himself being a little bit bigger than he is, and watching that humor of just bringing him to himself. Not meanly. But kindly bringing him to himself. That is worth 10,000 workshops on how to deal with a sexist experience. I don't even know where to begin.
Everything that I do, I teach differently, I approach knowledge differently. Every bit of scholarship, every bit of the way that I understand myself in the world, transformed. And in ways that people don't even recognize. Let me give you one little example, okay? Just so that it's not so all over the map.
One time I was with Tillie Black Bear and she called her newborn grandson, "Grandfather." And I said, "Tillie, is there something I'm missing here? That guy looks pretty little to me." And she said, "We're spiritual ..." and I hope I'm doing this correctly. This is the best I understand and remember. She said, "We're spiritual beings on a physical journey, and those most sacred are those who are coming from the spirit world and those who are returning to the spirit world." And so, their [inaudible 00:30:44] together.
I think she first started out with a little bit of Lakota humor that was like, "Well, both of them don't have teeth, and need diapers." [inaudible 00:30:53] but something like that, and then the deeper. But what that gift has given me is a sense of growing old in a different way. I'm 78. I, in my Western thought, live horizontally or in vertically. So, it's like from birth to death is a straight line. If I think of myself ... So, I'm approaching an end. But if I think of myself with the gift of that thought from Tillie, I understand why I keep feeling younger. As I grow older, it's like a lot of the crap just disappears. You get down to some more basic stuff.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
And so, I feel younger and younger and younger as I grow older and older. And it makes sense to me in a Lakota way. I don't have any understanding of it in a White Christian Western way. So, that's just one tiny example. But watching women who are, as you said, so self-empowered, not in any way of superiority, but and watching them just follow what a woman says. Louise says something, men are just doing it. There's not a sense of ... The subtle ways in which we as women incorporate and live in the non-Native, non-indigenous world, live in a sense of our secondary status, coming from generations of that. And to be with women who come from generations of empowerment and balance and harmony, not superiority, not living in a hierarchy, but living in a circle. It's just mind-blowing.
Lori Walsh:
So, when we look at 2020, where we have elected the first female Vice President of the United States, we have examples of authority and political power in the United States of America, such as Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, Governor Kristi Gnome from South Dakota, Amy Coney Barrett in the U.S. Supreme Court, vastly different ways of seeing authority and political influence, even though we would define all these women as women. We would see, we would talk about the first female governor of the state, the first female Vice President, that might be where their similarities end, in a lot of ways, from a political influence standpoint.
From the Haudenosaunee perspective, what are the lessons of political authority and how to use it that you think might be relevant in 2020?
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Every person has a voice. When the clan mother nominates the chief, it's not a spur-of-the-moment thing. She's watched these boys grow up. She's watched the boy who has stepped back and let others step forward, and who sees the needs of people, who is thoughtful and considerate and not self-promoting. She's watched him play lacrosse, she's watched to see, "Is he a team player?" She's watched to see how he is with his grandmother. "Does he watch to see if she needs something? Does he bring her something to drink if he thinks she might ..."
That's who she watches, that's who she grooms, that's who she nominates. Then she goes to all the women, and that includes children, "Is there any reason he should not represent us, he should not be our voice?" What clan mothers have said to me is that there are three, sort of, general rules. He does have to have thick skin. Seven layers thick, I think they say, so that he can stand the criticism that will come and take the courageous. He has to make all decisions for the seventh generation.
"The faces still in the Earth," is the way they describe the unborn. He must make decisions that he hears through the clan mother what the will of the people is. Because she's the eyes and the ears. And if he goes against that, if he does something for himself, she gives him a warning. If he, a second time, she tries to bring him back to the path. If second time he strays, she tries to bring him back again, and if a third time he does it, she has the responsibility to remove him. She alone has that. That's part of her task, her job, the balance of authority.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
And the three things that he cannot have done: he cannot have committed a theft, he cannot ever have stolen anything, he cannot have committed a murder. And if he's a warrior, he has to step down. And he cannot have abused a woman. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine that being a rule for leadership?
So, the process of choosing a leader is, as I understand it ... and I'm again, I'm a non-Native, I'm the opening act. Louise is the one who talks about what really goes on. She's the one to listen to tomorrow night. Or Tuesday, huh?
Lori Walsh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Whenever this airs.
Lori Walsh:
Right.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
Yeah. But I think that the bottom line, as one woman explained to me, is that we look for character. We know that people are going to make mistakes, but we look for somebody's character. "How careful are they of other people? How thoughtful are they in making their decisions? How much are they listening to the will of the people?" Those kinds of qualities. "Is this an arrogant person?" No. Never be a chief.
So, I think that leads to different decisions about who will be a leader.
Lori Walsh:
And how they will lead, yeah.
Sally Roesch Wagner:
And how they will lead.